The Apple Tree

The real economic impact of growth stars like Apple Computer isn't their on-the-books creation of jobs and wealth -- it's the way they breed countless entrepreneurs who build companies of their own

When a start-up starts to grow, it doesn't grow by income statement alone, as financial convention would have it. A start-up's growth also influences commerce and community through off-balance-sheet channels: opening new markets, motivating others to create new businesses, enriching employees, rewarding investors. It does those things many times over, affecting the economy more profoundly than most observers -- politicians, social commentators, even economists -- acknowledge.

Inc. calls those hidden aspects of small-company expansion the multiplier effect, or ME for short. On the face of it, toting up the collective worth of a given company's ME through years of growth seems beyond analysis. Not so, we decided: an ME would be calculable simply as a total of revenues for all the companies that exist only because the original grower does -- but only if we could identify the ways in which a business's growth encourages people to build companies of their own. Once you do that, you can calculate how big an ME is.

Well, how big is one? Inc. wanted to know. We decided to flesh out the branches of growth as they parted from the core company and became progenitors of growth themselves. We would hunt down all businesses that could claim lineage from the initial seed.

Businesses that came to exist only because the core company existed; businesses that employees of the core company went out and started; businesses that employees of those businesses subsequently went out and started; companies that venture-capital profit from investments in the core company helped create; any social or cultural entities engendered; and so on -- all would be fruit on the family tree.

We chose Apple Computer Inc. as our growth-company trunk and gave two reporters eight weeks to construct the branches. Those resources, it turned out, weren't nearly enough. Given eight reporters and two years, we still wouldn't have been able to close the book on that particular company's ME, once we began tracing its spread through the economic countryside. All those branches -- and dozens of others yet to be counted -- from a seedling conceived in a Cupertino, Calif., garage barely 17 years ago. (See "Branching Out," page 5.)

Still, Apple represents any dynamic grower, not just some high-tech celebrity. (Garbage collector WMX Technologies Inc., formerly Waste Management Systems, was founded in 1968 and has grown faster than Apple has -- but trash disposal doesn't make for such a pretty tree.) To be sure, from first-year revenues of a scant $774,000 in 1977, Apple has become one of the nation's largest high-tech manufacturers. Bear in mind, however, that Apple is still so young that had it been born a human, many municipalities today wouldn't let it take a drink, sign a contract, attend an NC-17 movie without adult supervision, or get married.

Uncle Sam wouldn't allow this precocious adolescent to serve the country, either. Yet, as its genealogy shows, it already has -- in often underappreciated ways. To wit:

The Seattle Opera has become a world-class troupe, thanks largely to the support of Michael Scott, who endows it from the millions of dollars he stockpiled as Apple's first president.

Start-ups seeking seed capital collectively have received about $30 million since Apple's own venture-capital arm was established, in 1989.

The day Apple stock went public, the company turned about 40 employees into millionaires. And the average price of a Cupertino home as of December 1992 was $355,000.

Inc. weighed several proposals for how to convey most convincingly one company's total economic impact. No less central a player than the person who helped launch Apple, cofounder A. C. "Mike" Markkula Jr., sent us this one, which we reluctantly dismissed: "I don't think anyone on the planet knows all of the relationships you're trying to identify. An interesting angle would be to calculate the cumulative amount of corporate income tax and personal income tax -- payroll and taxes on stock-options profits -- paid to the state and federal governments by companies spawned by Apple and employees of those companies. I think people would be stunned by the answer."

From its founding, Apple liberally sprinkled stock options among employees. It's impossible to determine how many dollars' worth have been converted over the years, but here's a hint: as of June 1993 Apple's current officers and directors held more than 9 million shares -- nearly half a billion dollars' worth of buying power waiting to be unleashed. And that's in addition to what's already been unleashed: Apple's three cofounders alone have provided capital for five additional companies in less than 10 years.

The inclination for an option-holding nouveau riche to plow that new money into his or her own new business is documented here. So's the audacity that drives those upstarts to start another round of businesses after the first. And business siring may not end there. Former Apple marketing director William M. "Trip" Hawkins III has already founded -- before age 40 -- two companies with a combined market value of $1.3 billion.

The ME also includes return on human capital -- the pool of special techniques and skills acquired at the growth business and reinvested later in other businesses. Take the nonoperations labor force at Radius Inc., a graphics-systems manufacturer started by former Apple software developer Michael D. Boich. At least 25% of the 200 or so employees in Radius engineering and sales "have Apple in their backgrounds."

The intensity of growth is such that even those who came to Apple untutored couldn't help leaving tutored -- sometimes in disciplines different from what they intended. In 1982, at age 22, legislative aide David Beaver was hired to help Apple president Steven Jobs navigate the world of politics. Instead, Beaver got drawn into the world of software when he learned how to write code. "I didn't set out to have a career in high tech," he admits, "but at Apple I realized I was better at programming than politics." Beaver left and founded the Automation Group Inc., a custom programmer serving businesses that own Macintoshes.

"It wasn't just the hard skills," appends five-year Apple sales-and-marketing veteran Shawn Miller, "I also got the confidence I needed to do it." "It" being I Love My Nanny, the child-care service she founded in 1988. (See "Shawn Miller: Inspired," page 4.) Miller later saw her husband, Larry, leave an Apple executive position to lead optical-character-recognition firm Caere Corp., now a $215-million public company. Much the same thinking persuaded an engineer named Steven Jobs to quit his first out-of-college job and give computer making a try. His then boss: Nolan Bushnell, founder of the then-four-year-old start-up Atari Corp.

An atmosphere that tolerates error reaps invention. In the early phases of any company's growth, the focus is more on getting product out the door than on establishing hierarchical boundaries. "We used to kid that what Apple lacked most was adult supervision," says Bill Cleary about Apple's formative years. But the outcome was serious: "We could make mistakes there -- big ones -- and not lose our jobs." After keeping his job in corporate marketing for four years, Cleary went on to found CKS Partners Inc., and brought in two other Apple alumni.

All told, Inc. traced more than 100 fiscal entities to roots at Apple. Given time, undoubtedly we would find hundreds more. But we still wouldn't have reached the end. So we rest our case and go on to describe some mechanisms by which, in any small-business growth setting, the multiplier effect unfolds.

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The High-Stakers Individuals whose yield from one small-business investment enables them to fund additional small businesses

A conundrum: Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak got their shares of Apple for nothing. Where did the hundreds of millions of dollars they later cashed out with come from?

When a start-up is founded and flourishes, capital is minted from thin air. The phenomenon can go on forever, as investors take profits and reapply them to founding more new businesses, each time by bigger multipliers than the last.

Early Apple backer Arthur Rock risked $57,600 for about 4.5% of the start-up in 1977. Rock sold a portion three years later, when Apple went public at $22 a share. Not to worry: as of mid-1993, the venture capitalist still had an untapped $40 million worth.

At the time Apple's initial public offering was staged, in December 1980, San Francisco underwriter Hambrecht & Quist was a tiny regional banker. "Suddenly, there we were, comanaging this major deal," says H&Q's Bill Hambrecht. "It catapulted us into the world, it elevated our credibility. 'The Folks Who Brought You Apple' became our tag line." The ME result: in 1980 H&Q did $557 million in underwritings; in 1983, more than $2 billion.

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The Bankrolled Individuals who sell their stock holdings or save income to get enough money to capitalize their own start-ups

Apple Computer was partially funded, in 1977, with $250,000 from the pocket of Mike Markkula, who, for the purpose, cashed in stock options he'd been granted by his former employer, Intel Corp. Thus was set in motion a major dynamic of the ME: internally propagated money.

Apple immediately put aside 20% of its shares to reward workers with. All else being equal, that portion today is worth about $1.3 billion, or $90,000 per present employee. But even at the humblest company that proffers options to lure key people, some recipients are more equal than others.

Eased out of Apple in 1985, cofounder Jobs gradually shed some 6 million shares of Apple stock. Still only 30, he committed about $80 million of the proceeds to start software developer NeXT Computer Inc. Eventually, H. Ross Perot, founder of Electronic Data Systems (itself a once-small business), paid $20 million from the proceeds of his sale of EDS for a 16% share in NeXT -- exactly 100 times the dollar amount Markkula had invested 10 years earlier for the same proportion of Apple.

Not every entrepreneurial casher-out is motivated to build an operating business. Marketing executive Paul Dali threw his chips into 3I, a venture-capital firm. Karyn Frances Gray threw hers into watercolors and is now a nationally known painter.

And here's what happens when everybody in a company qualifies for options: ex-secretary Louise Stanley converted a relatively modest share of Apple into Details, a retail merchandiser.

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The Experiential M.B.A.'s Individuals who acquire sufficient management acumen to found and run their own businesses

In the early years of a small business, proceedings are mainly ad hoc. No harm done: management experiments that turn out not to work are paid for by experiments that do.

"Where else could you get that kind of education?" marvels Radius Inc. CEO Charles W. Berger, who started as Apple's treasurer in 1982 at 29 and was promoted to its senior team by age 31. "We had more responsibility than we would at a big company, and more authority to do something with that responsibility, because there was a lack of corporate infrastructure to place boundaries on it."

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The Technicians Individuals who acquire specialized product or service know-how and establish new businesses based on it

As any start-up develops its own ways of doing things, the employees who do them gain proprietary skills (whether having to do with computer technology, truck-chassis assembly, or the cooking of blackened redfish) that serve as valuable currency for founding their own companies. The impetus to branch out often comes when an employee's personal growth outpaces his or her employer's growth.

Founded by three former Apple technologists, futuristic research-and-development firm General Magic "is an excellent example," says Albert Eisenstat, now Apple's executive vice-president, "of what happens when Apple people provide an outlet on their own."

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The Inspired Individuals stimulated by the start-up activity of others to start a business of their own

The pull of someone else's leaving to go into business encourages stay-behinds to ponder the possibility of doing so themselves. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell calls it the "Existence Proof." His definition: "When a person at the desk next to you leaves, starts a business, and becomes successful, by extrapolation -- since at one point you both 'existed' at the same spot -- you ask, Then why not me? Everybody who lives in Silicon Valley knows somebody who's made a lot of money, and they can see he's smart, but he's not that smart. People with normal aspirations, normal education, normal capabilities start thinking maybe they can do it, too. The minute that happens, a new world opens up."

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The Opportunists Individuals who start businesses to capture the complementary industrial and consumer markets that a growth company introduces

"I would absolutely say [local-area-network builder] Tops never would have been successful, nor have been inspired the way it was, had it not been for Apple's Macintosh computer," effuses A. Nathaniel Goldhaber, Tops's cofounder, who's now CEO of Kaleida Labs Inc., an Apple-IBM joint venture in interactive multimedia. "The timing was perfect. We rolled out our first product simultaneously with the first spurt of the Mac in late 1986. We had back orders for 20,000 units the day we started shipping." Goldhaber parlayed Tops's eventual sale into seed money for several other start-ups.

Macworld Exposition, a trade-show manager, stages two Apple-oriented consumer expositions a year, one on each coast. In the August 1992 expo, 424 companies rented booths. Among the countless enterprises born to offer products or services in the market Apple created -- peripheral-equipment makers, newsletter publishers, magazines, trade shows, and the like -- is MacTemps Inc., an employment agency that got its start by placing office staffers who worked only on Macs.

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The Camp Followers Individuals who found companies to provide goods and services to a core company

The lawyers, public-relations firms, accountants, travel agencies, and such that administer to a growing start-up usually are preexisting enterprises that expand to accommodate the new business. Vigorous growth, however, stimulates the genesis of a fresh entourage.

Two years after setting up shop -- known as Kim's Khocolate -- in her mother's kitchen, 18-year-old Kim Merritt began selling custom-made confectioneries to Apple's company store. A year later, in 1987, Apple ordered 77,000 chocolate Macs for a direct-mail campaign. The order paid down two years of debt and kept the flabbergasted Merritt in business.

For years, massagers from Pacific Health Systems would come in to rub the necks of tired Apple employees -- until outside shareholders put a stop to it.

Knickknack broker Wood Associates Inc. was started to answer Apple's call for ways to pump up its salespeople. The solution: morale boosters like pens, coffee cups, and jackets.

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The Incalculable Individuals we haven't even counted

Maybe Markkula was right after all in suggesting we calculate taxes. Despite multiplier-effect researchers on both coasts and the help of enthusiastic volunteers, Inc. couldn't capture it all. Whatever the ultimate numbers are, they turned out to be magnitudes larger than anyone could anticipate.

Don't forget -- the farmer who got rich selling his prune orchard to Apple probably buys his Ferraris down the street; either that, or he started a new business himself. Whichever, it's one more branch.

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Reporting contributed by Abby Christopher. Note: financial references are to fiscal year 1992; market values are as of June 15, 1993.

The Multiplier Effect in Person

SHAWN MILLER: INSPIRED

Shawn Miller, 36, hardly considered herself a natural. "I had never thought before my stint at Apple about starting a business," she confesses. But after two kids and five years in sales and marketing for Apple, she encountered a not-so-simple problem at home: she couldn't find a nanny. Whereas Miller the mother working 80-hour weeks might have panicked, Miller the Apple marketer whispered, Eureka!

Apple had, after all, trained her to look for new markets -- and she knew that other women throughout Silicon Valley shared her child-care troubles. But beyond helping her develop that marketer's eye for opportunity, Apple had equipped Miller -- who in 1988 founded a nanny-placement service, I Love My Nanny, based in San Jose, Calif. -- with a complete entrepreneurial tool kit.

Thanks to Apple's generous training program, "I got everything I needed to run my own business," she says. "But most of all, I got the confidence to think I could pull it off."

Evidently, latent upstarts like Miller gained more than hard skills. Apple engendered in its employees an entire creed of self-assurance. "There was something about being there that made you believe you could accomplish anything. And you were given enormous power and encouragement to try. The message was always, Go for it."

Go she did. Miller has surpassed the six-figure income she left behind at Apple, as I Love My Nanny has doubled in revenues each year since its inception, thanks in part to a steady flow of business from (who else?) Apple employees themselves. -- Anne Murphy

ART MELLOR: EXPERIENTIAL M.B.A.

At 27, Art Mellor already had been dreaming of his own start-up for years. All he lacked was an idea. And maybe an iota of experience. OK, perhaps the first clue about how to run a business, too. Details.

Mellor had a simple plan: "I decided to get a job at the smallest company that would hire me." When he interviewed at Apple descendant Cayman Systems Inc., a maker of Mac-intosh networking software and hardware based in Cambridge, Mass., he recalls, "I told them I was looking for a place that would teach me how to start my own company. They said, 'You're hired.' "

By his own account, three years at Cayman taught Mellor more about running a business than he would have learned from any business school he might have overpaid for. Just what did he learn? "To shut up and listen to customers, for one thing," he says. How to hire, select partners, set up operations, and watch his cash, to mention a few more. He stumbled across a market and a product as well.

"More than anything," contends Mellor, "I learned from the company's mistakes" -- of which even as successful an enterprise as Cayman makes plenty. "It's easier to remember those lessons because they're so painful."

Mellor and his partners have been running Midnight Networks Inc., a developer of network-management and -validation software in Waltham, Mass., for a year now. -- Anne Murphy

JEREMY JAECH: TECHNICIAN

It would be hard to find ways Jeremy Jaech, the 1990 founder of Seattle software maker Shapeware, wasn't entrepreneurially enabled by his five years with fast-growing Apple descendant Aldus Corp., the early leader in desktop-publishing software for the Macintosh.

Jaech, 38, was bank- rolled (he seeded Shapeware with proceeds from his sale of Aldus stock), inspired ("I got to believing I could do it. Watching Aldus's success, being part of it, I didn't have doubts"), and experientially M.B.A.'d ("I was enabled to start my own business by what I learned as an officer of the company").

Even more, he was able during his Aldus stint to acquire specialized knowledge of the software marketplace -- knowledge that Shapeware now trades on. After starting in product development and moving through marketing, Jaech ended up assessing other companies' technologies with then Aldus colleague and now Shapeware cofounder Ted Johnson.

"We looked at companies as prospective acquisitions or licensing partners. Repeatedly going through that evaluation process gave me a real feel for what products I might be able to build and sell myself. I learned what was viable and what was not -- not just from the technology or engineering standpoint but from the market perspective. Is there a customer? You do that enough, and ultimately you feel you can start your own software business and create marketable products," says Jaech.

Which he and Johnson have done. Shapeware, which makes software for computer-assisted drawing, has raised $4.3 million in venture capital on top of the founders' initial $150,000 investment, and has reached annualized revenues of $12 million a year. -- Abby Christopher

BRANCHING OUT

The Beginning . . . You could count the 159 million computers sitting atop desks from Boston to Bombay and say this is what Steven Jobs wrought. But Apple didn't simply invent the personal computer, revolutionize an industry, and create thousands of jobs. It begot other businesses. Which, in turn, begot yet other businesses, which in time will no doubt beget more businesses still. It is the heritage of entrepreneurship: one generation makes the markets or the mistakes that give rise to the next. Whether in technology, know-how, or just plain opportunity, a legacy is passed on. And when the progenitor is Apple, the lines of descent become prodigious indeed; the long roll call of descendants on the next page isn't close to comprehensive. And the branches described here are just two of the countless many on Apple's family tree.

Software Arts Apple inspired as much as it profited from the ingenuity of entrepreneurs like Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. In 1979 the two cofounded Software Arts to develop the first electronic spreadsheet, which ran on the Apple II. Known as VisiCalc, the product won a vast discipleship of corporate users and proved crucial to sales of Apple II's. Software Arts developed subsequent versions of VisiCalc, which were also marketed by the company's publisher and Siamese twin, VisiCorp. By 1982 Software Arts was an $11-million company supporting 125 employees.

VisiCorp Dan Fylstra had been operating a publishing business, Personal Software, from a spare bedroom. When that business was born again as VisiCalc's marketer and distributor, Fylstra changed its name to VisiCorp. By 1982 Fylstra was selling 30,000 copies a month. He also published related software products, one of which was developed by a guy named Mitch Kapor. Kapor reportedly reaped more than half a million dollars in annual royalties from sales of that product. VisiCorp ultimately bought him out. It also employed him long enough to introduce him to the spreadsheet market and give him a glimpse of an early IBM PC.

Lotus Kapor's net from the sale of his add-on amounted to $600,000, half of which he sank into developing a spreadsheet program for the as-yet-unproven IBM PC. Introduced in early 1983, Lotus's 1-2-3 rang up a breathtaking $53 million in sales its first year. By December 1984 Kapor's venture boasted $157 million in revenues and 741 employees. Meanwhile, VisiCorp and Software Arts were divorcing in a bloody legal battle. By the spring of 1985 Lotus Development Corp. had acquired Software Arts.

Beyond The success of Lotus ensured Kapor's place in the entrepreneurial hall of fame, but the lineage hardly ends there. Chuck Digate, who joined Lotus in 1983 to head international operations, always suspected he'd run his own business someday. He left Lotus in March 1988 to start Beyond Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., maker of high-end electronic-mail systems for local-area networks. Digate credits his success in raising venture capital ($14 million to date) and recruiting his management team (many of them Lotus alums) to his track record at Lotus. He now has 60 employees in nine locations and expects to reach $10 million in revenues this year.

Quark Among the opportunists who might call Apple "Mother" is a Denver-based software developer named Tim Gill, who founded a company called Quark Inc. not long after Apple rolled out its first machine. In 1982 Gill's business introduced the first word-processing program for the Apple III. Quark eventually designed a desktop-publishing package called QuarkXPress. The rapidly expanding desktop-publishing market -- brought to you by Apple -- and the rousing success of Quark's publishing software catapulted Gill's company to $80 million in revenues today, with a payroll of 400 and luxuriant profit margins. Along the way, just as Apple spawned new life-forms such as Quark, Quark fostered its own entrepreneurial tidal pool.

XChange Meet son of Quark: XChange Inc., a marketing and distribution company in San Francisco, formed in 1991 by William Buckingham to serve the Quark aftermarket. The success of QuarkXPress had created new niches for add-on programs. But the developers creating those products had no cost-effective way to reach the market. Enter XChange, now just two years old but already selling internationally and posting nearly $5 million in annual revenues -- not exactly seismic in macroeconomic terms, but plenty significant to the company's 25 employees. And to Paul Schmitt. He got a business out of it.

A Lowly Apprentice Production A solo developer of Quark XTension products, Schmitt started A Lowly Apprentice Production out of his home, in La Jolla, Calif. Thanks to an industry pioneered by Apple, markets created by Quark, and channels opened by XChange, Schmitt was able to turn a hacking hobby into a part-time business grossing $5,000 a month last year -- enough to kiss his day job good-bye. He began calling himself president, full-time, this summer.

17. Boston Computer Society, 1978, Cambridge, Mass. Employees: 15 Revenues: Not available Business: Nonprofit user group (25,000 members in the United States and 40 foreign countries); offers help lines, publishes newsletters, and conducts workshops and seminars